Recently, a colleague I deeply respect led a group through Montgomery and Selma, and on to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana.
I’m grateful for that kind of leadership. Truly. Those places matter. They tell the truth in ways we still need to hear.
But I’ll admit that there’s something in me that always tugs a little when I hear about trips like this.
I grew up in Georgia. I went to public schools that had only recently been integrated. Not in the 1860s. In the 1970s. So when I hear people talk about racism, especially when it gets framed as a “Southern story,” I hear it a little differently.
Because we run the risk of telling the story in a way that puts the problem safely somewhere else.
It’s not a new instinct. You can hear it in the music. Neil Young lined it out in Southern Man, holding up the South as the place where the nation’s sins were most visible. And then Lynyrd Skynyrd responded with Sweet Home Alabama, not denying the history, exactly, but pushing against being singled out as if the rest of the country stood on higher moral ground.
Two songs, talking past each other a bit. One naming something real. The other resisting being made the whole story.
Down there. Back then. Those people.
The truth is, racism has never been just a Southern story.
Slavery didn’t run on Southern labor alone. It ran on a whole economic system. Northern mills processed the cotton. Northern banks financed expansion. Northern ships moved the goods. Northern insurance companies were underwriting it all. The lines between North and South were never as clean as we sometimes make them out to be.
And even the way slavery ended is more complicated than we often admit. Yes, there were people of deep moral conviction who fought to end it. That matters. It should be honored. In my own faith tradition, we honor the American Missionary Society, and tell the story of the Amistad.
But slavery didn’t end only because the nation had a change of heart. It ended in the middle of a struggle over power over which states would shape the future, over whether slavery would expand or be contained, over who would decide what this country would become. The lines weren’t drawn just between right and wrong. They were drawn between competing visions of power.
That doesn’t diminish what was gained. But it does strip away the illusion that the story is simple.
And when slavery ended, the story didn’t end. It adapted. Jim Crow. Redlining. Segregated schools, not just by law, but by design. And in our own time, a criminal justice system that still falls unevenly, and predictably, along racial lines. Not the same thing. But not separate stories either. There’s a throughline there, whether we’re comfortable naming it or not.
Which is why I find myself hoping for something more when I hear about these trips. Not less. More.
That people will see what happened in Montgomery and Selma, in Birmingham and Atlanta, in small towns and large cities all across the South, including the town I grew up in, Griffin, Georgia.
But that they’ll come home and ask harder questions.
Where do we see echoes of this history where we live?
What systems have we inherited without really examining them?
What stories have we told ourselves that make the problem feel distant, like something that belongs to another place?
Because the real power of a trip like this isn’t just what you learn while you’re there.
It’s what you’re willing to see when you get back.
If these journeys help us tell a fuller story—one that includes all of us—then they’re doing exactly what they’re meant to do.
Not just teaching history.
But telling the truth in a way that calls all of us into it.
